This paper was presented at a workshop entitled: Corpora for research on Emotion & Affect at the LREC 2008 conference in Marrakesh, Morocco. It is published in the conference proceedings, paper and electronic.

Abstract

This paper details a process of creating an emotional speech corpus by collecting natural emotional speech assets, analysisng and tagging them (for certain acoustic and linguistic features) and annotating them within an on-line database. The definition of specific metadata for use with an emotional speech corpus is crucial, in that poorly (or inaccurately) annotated assets are of little use in analysis. This problem is compounded by the lack of standardisation for speech corpora, particularly in relation to emotion content. The ISLE Metadata Initiative (IMDI) is the only cohesive attempt at corpus metadata standardisation performed thus far. Although not a comprehensive (or universally adopted) standard, IMDI represents the only current standard for speech corpus metadata available. The adoption of the IMDI standard allows the corpus to be re-used and expanded, in a clear and structured manner, ensuring its re-usability and usefulness as well as addressing issues of data-sparsitiy within the field of emotional speech research.